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Facebook Courts Brand Marketers With New Ad, Audience Insights

Ask marketers why they’re shoveling money into fan pages and ads on Facebook, and many will admit they’re still fuzzy on what they’re getting. A new survey by ad tech firm Collective found that although 62% of marketers and agencies planned to spend more money on social media compared with six months ago, only 12% think it works in an ad campaign. A quarter said they don’t understand the value of social media.

Facebook aims to give marketers some answers starting Monday morning at the annual New York confab Advertising Week. Drawing a stark contrast to Google’s massive search advertising business, which is chiefly used to spur direct sales, Facebook’s ad executives will talk up the No. 1 social network’s potential as a branding medium akin to television. (You can watch Facebook execs’ presentations live at the conference starting Monday at 9:45 a.m. Eastern.) Facebook’s hope is to persuade marketers to move more of their traditional television and print budgets toward its site, which now commands 800 million users worldwide.

New Ad

For one, Facebook will tee up a new, bigger ad that redoubles its efforts to inject social connections into advertising. Ratings firm Nielsen has found that when people see their friends’ names in Facebook’s existing “social ads,” which are messages from a marketer such as “Daphne and three of your other friends like Coke,” they’re twice as likely to remember its message and four times more likely to buy the product. And when they’re run in conjunction with another Facebook ad called Sponsored Stories–spontaneous user actions such as clicking a Like button that a marketer then pays Facebook to distribute to their friends–they get twice the number of clicks, Likes, and comments.

So not surprisingly, the new ad, called (no kidding) “Expanded Premium Ad,” essentially scrunches together those ads into a bigger unit that runs alone on users’ home pages. Let’s say Sony’s Columbia Pictures turns a post on the Facebook fan page for its new movie The Ides of March–such as “Rolling Stone calls Ides of March `A big bruising thriller’”–into an ad. If that ad runs on the home page of someone whose friends have already Liked the movie fan page, the ad will expand to show that.

According to Facebook’s research, when people see the brand’s message along with what friends are saying about the brand, ad recall doubles and people tend to click on or share the ad more often. “It’s putting your friends at the center of marketing,” David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations, said in an interview.

New Fan Page Metrics

Brands spend as much time using their free Facebook fan pages as a marketing tool as they do on ads. So the company is also spiffing up its analytics dashboard, called Insights, that tracks activity on their Facebook pages. Among other things, the updated Insights will sport a new metric called “People Talking About This.” Also visible on a fan page to Facebook users underneath the number of Likes, it will measure the number of times people take an action such as clicking a Like button, posting a message to the fan page, or sharing a fan page photo.

Facebook is also providing metrics showing how many friends of fans a page can reach and how many people were reached by a story or page post. And it’s providing a reading on whether a fan page post was reached by visiting the page, through seeing a story by a friend, or via an ad. The new metrics are intended to give the managers of some 15 million Facebook fan pages a better sense of how many people are actively engaging with their brands–and how to get them to engage more.

Ad agencies and Facebook page management companies will be able to tap into the new Insights for their clients through an Application Program Interface, or API. “They’re really trying to help you understand the flow of information among users,” says Josh Williams, president and chief scientific officer at analytics firm Kontagent, who says the new Insights “makes our job easier.”

Challenges

Facebook isn’t exactly struggling to get marketers onto its site. Its ad revenues are expected to double this year, to more than $4 billion, according to eMarketer. Yet despite all that money rolling in, Facebook still has a lot to prove. That’s especially true in the face of increasingly credible competition from other social services. Twitter’s ad revenues are expected to triple this year, and ad giant Google’s Google+ social network is taking off quickly, as are its revenues from display ads. And marketers are clamoring for a richer palette of advertising options than Facebook offers.

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